On this day in history: Montgolfier Brothers first public balloon flight, 1783

Before the pioneering balloon flights of Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne, the Montgolfier family of Vidalon, near Annanoy in south-eastern France, were best known as owners of a successful paper making business. The twelfth of fifteen children, Joseph was a dreamer and the first to consider constructing flying machines. His youngest brother Étienne provided the technical knowledge and skill to make Joseph's dreams a reality.

In November 1782, while living in Avignon, Joseph started experimenting with small models made of wood and taffeta under which he lit a small fire. When the model rose, Joseph concluded that the smoke from the fire contained 'Montgolfier Gas' that had a special property he called 'levity'. This phenomenon had been known since 1709 when a Brazilian priest, Bartolomeu de Gusmão, made a ball rise to the ceiling of the hall of the Casa da India, Lisbon, in the presence of King John V of Portugal. Despite being made a professor at the University of Coimbra, de Gusmão never developed a large scale lighter-than-air-ship.

Encouraged by his initial results, Joseph Montgolfier sent for Étienne, who had trained in Paris as an architect and thus had the ability to take Joseph's experiments forward. Indeed, within a month of the initial experiment, the brothers had constructed a device with twenty-seven times the volume of the original model which flew with such force that they could not maintain control of it. They eventually found their experiment around two kilometres away.

On 4th June 1783, the brothers were ready for their first public demonstration. They readied their balloon in the marketplace at Annanoy. The balloon was made from sackcloth, lined on the inside with layers of paper and had a volume of 28,000 cubic feet. The enormous device drew a sizeable crowd, including local dignitaries, who watched the ten minute flight. The brothers became famous overnight.

Étienne went to Paris to conduct further demonstrations in collaboration with Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, the famous wallpaper manufacturer. The result was the Aerostat Réveillon, which flew in September 1783 carrying a sheep, a rooster and a duck aloft watched by King Louis XVI, his Queen, Marie Antoinette, and a very large crowd gathered at Versailles. Two months later, following successful test flights with human passengers in tethered balloons, Pilatre de Rozier and Marquis d'Arlandes became the first humans to make an untethered balloon flight from Château de la Muette, Paris.

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On this day in history: Andy Warhol shot, 1968

Valerie Solanas was born in Ventnor City, New Jersey in 1936. Throughout Valerie's childhood her father subjected her to sexual abuse, before divorcing her mother in the 1940s. Valerie moved to Washington D.C. with her mother who remarried following their relocation. After clashing with her stepfather Valerie left home at the age of fifteen, but nevertheless managed to complete high-school and gain a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland.

In 1966 she gravitated to Greenwich Village where she wrote a play called Up Your Ass about a man-hating prostitute, which (according to some accounts) may be based on Solanas' own experiences. The next year, Solanas had a fateful encounter with the artist Andy Warhol, who agreed to look at the play with a view to producing it; however, he later said that he was wary that Solanas may have been a police officer attempting to entrap him because the play was so pornographic and the police had already shut down filming on some of his other movies on the grounds that they were obscene.

It was at this time that Solanas wrote the satirical radical feminist tract the SCUM Manifesto. SCUM being an acronym of Society for Cutting Up Men. Later in 1967, she demanded that Warhol return the script of her play. When Warhol said that he could not do so (because he has lost it), she demanded payment for the work. In compensation Warhol offered her a small role in one of his movies, I, A Man. Solanas took the role but was far from satisfied.


At around 4:15pm on 3rd June 1968, Solanas took the elevator with Warhol up to his artistic headquarters, the Factory. She had been waiting there most of the day, taking the same lift up there to see the artist in order to get money for the play. Paul Morrissey, one of Warhol's associates, had rebuffed her on every occasion and again demanded that she leave or he would have to throw her out. Solanas then took a .32 automatic pistol from a paper bag, which she fired at Warhol three times, hitting him with the third attempt. She then fired twice at the art critic Mario Amaya - one bullet finding its target - before putting the gun to the head of Warhol's manager, Fred Hughes. The pistol jammed just as the elevator arrived and Hughes suggested that she take it. Solanas agreed and departed.

Warhol barely survived the shooting. The bullet had struck both his lungs as well as his spleen, stomach, liver, and oesophagus. He never made a full recovery and in order to prevent the wounds from worsening, he had to wear a corset for the rest of his life. Solanas turned herself in to the police that evening saying, "He had too much control of my life." The police charged her with attempted murder along with other offences. Pleading guilty, Solanas received a three year sentence. After release, she made threatening telephone calls to Warhol as well as others and was arrested again in November 1971. She spent time in psychiatric institutions (she may well have been suffering from some form of mental disorder at the time of the shooting) before drifting into prostitution in San Francisco, where she died of emphysema and pneumonia at the age of 52, in 1988.

The SCUM Manifesto is available for download in pdf format from zinelibrary.info.

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On this day in history: Belgrade student revolt, 1968

In the late 1960s, student dissatisfaction was not solely confined to capitalist countries. Many students in Yugoslavia shared similar concerns with their fellows at universities in France, the United States, and other countries that had seen campus revolts. The students of the New Belgrade campus resented the privileges of the party elite, and this resentments boiled over on the night of 2nd June 1968.

A popular theatre company were booked to play the university. The students requested that they perform at the university's large open-air amphitheatre but instead authorities arranged for them to play a smaller venue and only make seats available to youth members of the ruling Communist party. On the night of the show, a large group students gathered outside the theatre and attempted to force their way in. When the police drove them out again they reacted by throwing stones at the theatre windows and smashing its doors.


The police responded by sending in a fire-engine to clear the streets, but the students managed to turn it over and set fire to it. They also started turning cars over to form barricades, as they had seen done by Parisian students on the television news. As the police pressed forward the retreated to the university campus where they discussed how to proceed.

The next day, around four thousand students decide to march on the centre of Belgrade to air their grievances: their disgust with the inequalities of the socialist state; their concerns about unemployment; their demand for establishment of real democracy. Halfway along the route, they find their way blocked by thousands of armed police, who fire into the crowd. The ensuing battle creates around seventy casualties.


That afternoon about ten thousand students occupy the Philosophy and Sociology Faculty on the New Belgrade campus and draw up a list of demands. Meanwhile, the streets of Belgrade fill with riot police instructed to squash any further demonstrations. Over the following days many of professors and other faculty staff join with the students in their occupation. Tensions rise - the press demands swift and merciless action against the students and on the 9th June police surround the university. But then, to widespread surprise, President Tito intervenes.

In a television address, he welcomes the students' criticism of the state and endorses their programme of reform. His words defuse the situation, the media performs a volte-face and the riot police disappear. The majority of students are jubilant, but a small hardcore of student activists continue to express their concerns and following another speech Tito, in which he denounced extremism, riot police moved in and cleared the Philosophy and Sociology Faculty on the 20th June. Slowly and surely the status quo was restored.

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